Reading is an indispensable skill in modern life. The ability to mentally convert written text into meaning allows people separated in place or time to communicate efficiently with each other. Unlike speech, which is a “natural” ability that almost everyone develops early in life without the need for instruction, literacy is a skill of relatively recent development that must be intensively taught.
In an alphabetic language such as English, text characters represent phonemes, the basic units of spoken sound. Phonemes make up syllables, which in turn make up words, and words are grouped into phrases and sentences that contain meaning. The first step in reading an alphabetic language is phonological, and involves decoding text characters into phonemes. The phonemes are grouped into syllables and the syllables into words. Once this decoding and grouping is accomplished, the reader internally “hears” each word. This activates the speech-understanding portions of the brain to obtain the meaning of the words and thereby understand the sentences that comprise them. The ability to decode text characters into phonemes is labelled “phonemic awareness”. Studies have shown that approximately twenty percent of people across all language groups have difficulty in developing phonemic awareness when learning to read, mostly for reasons related to brain functioning. As readers become more proficient, they start to recognise whole words, and even phrases, by shape, a function known as “sight word recognition” that involves the visual processing parts of the brain and enables fluency in reading. Developing phonemic awareness allows people to practice reading by themselves and develop sight word recognition without needing to hear an unfamiliar word pronounced externally. Most learners develop sight word recognition after successfully decoding a word five times (some need to see it more than ten times). Practice is therefore essential for developing sight word recognition.
The English language presents particular problems to would-be readers because it has, for historical reasons, relatively poor phonemic orthography, that is, correspondence between how words are spelled and how they are spoken. There is a two-way ambiguity in English orthography. Firstly, many phonemes can be spelled more than one way (for example the long—“e” sound in the word “me” can be spelled as “e”, “ey”, “ee”, “ei”, “ea”, “y”, or “ie”). This ambiguity is referred to as homophonic ambiguity, as it gives rise to homophones—words that are pronounced the same but are spelled differently (e.g. “steel” and “steal”). Secondly, many characters and character combinations (or “graphemes”) represent multiple phonemes. For example, the grapheme “a”, in addition to representing its “basic” phoneme, i.e. the phoneme as which the grapheme is most frequently pronounced (the short “a” sound in “at”), represents at least three other phonemes (as in “ate”, “wash”, and “about”). This is referred to as homographic ambiguity, as it gives rise to homographs—words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently (e.g. “bow” to rhyme with “cow”, and “bow” to rhyme with “show”). It is homographic ambiguity that presents difficulties to would-be readers. By some estimates, more than half of the words in any passage of standard English text are non-phonetic, in the sense that they involve graphemes representing phonemes other than their basic phonemes. This fraction is even greater for proper names, for example “Cholmondeley”, which is pronounced “Chumley”. Even proficient readers struggle to phonetically decode unfamiliar proper names correctly. To learn to read such words correctly, a would-be reader can attempt to learn an often inconsistent, and invariably incomplete, set of rules as to how phonemes vary according to context. Alternatively, they can jump straight to the “sight word recognition” stage of reading. Either of these tasks is laborious for most people, particularly so for adults. If the would-be reader does not already know the sound and meaning of the word, the task of phonetic decoding is made more difficult. Therefore, even children or adults with normal phonemic awareness, but who have smaller vocabularies than those from higher-education backgrounds, will struggle with phonetic decoding of anything other than the simplest standard English text.
English is also unusual in that the number of people who speak, but cannot read or write, English in some form as a second language vastly exceeds the number of native speakers. There is also a large class of people, particularly in Asian countries, who can understand written English, but cannot pronounce it. Such people are relying solely on sight word recognition, as they would do in their native, pictographic languages.
There is thus a large number of adults who could benefit from assistance in learning to phonetically decode English, in addition to children of native speakers.
There have been many attempts to reform English spelling to reduce the ambiguities and thereby make written English more phonetic. They fall into two basic categories: those that operate within the existing Roman alphabet, and those that introduce new characters, or variants of existing characters. None of these proposals has ever been widely adopted, for a variety of reasons. Those that operate within the existing alphabet tend not be able to reduce the ambiguities sufficiently to make the reform effort worthwhile, while those that do not involve substantial adaptation costs. Moreover, teaching new readers to read using previous versions of reformed English renders standard English text, which will always predominate, more difficult to read for those readers.
The advent of electronic publishing has made the distribution of documents, particularly books, in customised formats economically feasible. Where previously “special formats” to aid reading by people with reading difficulties of all kinds were limited to large-print books, it is now possible to prepare and distribute books and other documents in a large variety of legibility-aiding formats to suit all kinds of reading difficulties. Examples of such formats include shorter lines, larger line spacing, grading of font sizes over words and lines, eye-tracking guidelines, and many others. However, such formats have not catered to the specific reading difficulty of poor phonemic awareness, or to the needs of adult non-native English speakers.